I have 4 PI 2's 3 Pi 3's and 1 zero that are all on 24/7, i am networking them all, but what i have noticed with the latest jessie update is that the cards dont last long, no 8 gb card has lasted longer than 7 days in either the 3, 2 or zero, 128 gb cards lasted 3 months with the rest lasting between a week and 3 months, i have saved 13 dead cards from 8gb to 128gb should raspberry pi wish to see them, give me a mailing address and i will send them to you, has anyone else had these problems, getting a bit tired of having to buy new cards, any help will be welcome

If you promise to talk to him politely and not reveal who provided the details, I'll share the fact that Gordon Hollingsworth, Director of Software for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and author of the blog item that you commented on, is a member of these forums under the handle of gsh.

Maybe you could use the Send Private Message facility of the forum to make your request to have your 'blown' cards examined for a possible RPi-related cause?

As Dougie says, buy decent quality cards (genuine Samsung Evo for example) and look after them. If your cards are not fake, and they only last for a few days, then you are doing something terribly wrong.

I use an OS than runs from ram like piCore.
Have some that have been running 24/7 for nearly 2 years.
Cameras with MotionEyeOS also 2 years.

Constant read/writes will kill cards, latest Jessie is really good at this.
I have had Jessie "kill' cards, but have then got them working again and used on piCore.
Had to get new 16GB cards for 24/7 pikrellcam running on Jessie Lite.

Could boot from SD card and run from USB stick.
Cheaper cards probably have less read/write cycles, flash with more bad bits or a worse bit stuck algorithm.
Some even have a cpu that trick you into thinking they have more memory and may use compression.

Cheap high capacity cards are targets for counterfeiting.
I used to worry about 16GB, now these are cheap enough, the target has moved up to 32GB+
The most counterfeited are Sandisk.
My most reliable cards are very old 128MB ones, but I only have two.
Look for industrial SD cards if you are doing 24/7 on lots of Pi's.

Very new boot options on Pi3 are USB mass storage, no SD card needed.
If as you say the 3's are networked then you have netboot as an option.
Pi2's will have to have bootload.bin etc on SD but then get the kernel etc from the network.

You are not saying what you are doing with the Pi's.
Do you need Jessie?

B.Goode wrote:If you promise to talk to him politely and not reveal who provided the details, I'll share the fact that Gordon Hollingsworth, Director of Software for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and author of the blog item that you commented on, is a member of these forums under the handle of gsh.

Maybe you could use the Send Private Message facility of the forum to make your request to have your 'blown' cards examined for a possible RPi-related cause?

TY, I will look into that, I think its the Jessie OS as I have one pi at my sons house that is on 24/7(a network end) that I have not updated and is still running, almost a year with the same card

DougieLawson wrote:Stop buying cheapo crappo Chinese fake cards, pay the full price, get a card with a warranty (then you can send it back if it fails before the warranty expires).

Normally you are very helpful, I do not buy cheap cards, I am an engineer and have developed this project to the same standard as I did when I worked in labs and gained patents, but over the last year I have found your comments very helpful but not today.

As Dougie says, buy decent quality cards (genuine Samsung Evo for example) and look after them. If your cards are not fake, and they only last for a few days, then you are doing something terribly wrong.

I use an OS than runs from ram like piCore.
Have some that have been running 24/7 for nearly 2 years.
Cameras with MotionEyeOS also 2 years.

Constant read/writes will kill cards, latest Jessie is really good at this.
I have had Jessie "kill' cards, but have then got them working again and used on piCore.
Had to get new 16GB cards for 24/7 pikrellcam running on Jessie Lite.

Could boot from SD card and run from USB stick.
Cheaper cards probably have less read/write cycles, flash with more bad bits or a worse bit stuck algorithm.
Some even have a cpu that trick you into thinking they have more memory and may use compression.

Cheap high capacity cards are targets for counterfeiting.
I used to worry about 16GB, now these are cheap enough, the target has moved up to 32GB+
The most counterfeited are Sandisk.
My most reliable cards are very old 128MB ones, but I only have two.
Look for industrial SD cards if you are doing 24/7 on lots of Pi's.

Very new boot options on Pi3 are USB mass storage, no SD card needed.
If as you say the 3's are networked then you have netboot as an option.
Pi2's will have to have bootload.bin etc on SD but then get the kernel etc from the network.

You are not saying what you are doing with the Pi's.
Do you need Jessie?

ty for that, yes Jessie would seem to be the problem, I may explore this USB idea but I have to think of user friendliness for new users.

ty, that was most useful, so you give 5.25v as a max and i can see from your history you have a great deal of experience in the raspberry pi.
my complete history jbsummers . uk
now you can judge who i really am and not guess as to my skills
ty
john summers

PS: the Kingston cards only started going after the Jessie update of may, i have contacted Kingston's r&d department and they emailed me stating that they DO NOT support the raspberry pi, so they know there is a problem, but the others are Samsung and i had no luck in contacting them, this forum is my last port of call.

Last edited by johnb_summers on Sat Aug 06, 2016 11:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

johnb_summers wrote:ty, that was most useful, so you give 5.25v as a max and i can see from your history you have a great deal of experience in the raspberry pi.
my complete history jbsummers . uk
now you can judge who i really am and not guess as to my skills
ty
john summers

If everything is within spec then you may have a faulty RPi. If the failure happens on more than one RPi then it's most likely to be a bad batch of cards. But, what do I know I'm a software engineer.

I usually buy SDCards from http://ebuyer.com and in four years of running RPis I've only had one SDCard (a 32GB one) that failed completely (that was in the days when the firmware hadn't been fixed to prevent SDCard corruption).

DougieLawson wrote:If everything is within spec then you may have a faulty RPi. If the failure happens on more than one RPi then it's most likely to be a bad batch of cards. But, what do I know I'm a software engineer.

I usually buy SDCards from http://ebuyer.com and in four years of running RPis I've only had one SDCard (a 32GB one) that failed completely (that was in the days when the firmware hadn't been fixed to prevent SDCard corruption).

Wow, one of the pi projects i want to do is copy my first experiments that led to the patent, in those days i built a PI like device with a 8053, measuring waves and harmonics through gas will lead to some interesting things i feel, something the young can get into and feel like i did on the day i had my eureka moment, was an amazing day, pity it was 2 am in the morning and my wife didn't like being woken up, lol, but feel free to contact me when ever you want, i gave you my personal web page that has contact details

johnb_summers wrote:ty, that was most useful, so you give 5.25v as a max and i can see from your history you have a great deal of experience in the raspberry pi.
my complete history jbsummers . uk
now you can judge who i really am and not guess as to my skills
ty
john summers

LOL, well first time i seen that, wounder how he got the name summers, my grandfather was a refugee escaping Europe in 1910 and took the name summers when he landed in NY, he came to this country in 1917 to fight in the war, met my grandmother and stayed here.

it is very frustrating when microsdhc cards fail - i made the mistake of buying a number of Sandisk-branded 32GB cards from Amazon which turned out to be counterfeit - all failed within a day or so of use

on the other hand, for the past year i've been using Samsung EVO+ 32GB cards purchased from a local electronics chain store (initials 'bravo bravo')... prices ranged from US$11-$12... today there's a sale on EVO+ 64GB cards for US$19, so i bought a few more

the Samsung cards have been very reliable in months of constant use, and provide some decent r/w speeds, which saves a little time when doing backups... i keep a USB-sdhc carrier with a backup card in my 24/7 RPi3 music server and regularly do a backup using GNU ddrescue:

sudo ddrescue --force /dev/mmcblk0 /dev/sda

i also keep a backup on my development RPis - this gives me a little piece of mind

my recommendation? find a brand of card that works and buy a batch from the same manufacturing batch at one time - I will avoid amazon for microsdhc cards until amazon gets its defecation in configuration and stops mixing manufacturer and third-party products in the same product pool

I used to have sd card failures all time time. always bad sectors. but that was with the first pis, pi 1s.
My pi 1s, pi 2s, 3s and zeros are always on.
I find that all my bad sector problems come from power supplies and more so with inefficient cables. And one bent sd card that had 100% bad sectors.

i have only had the problem since the 27/05/2016 version of jessie, so all these people saying that have had them on for years cant have that version can they? and i dont think any of your 1's had that version, my cards too lasted UNTIL THE 27/05/2016 version